I've eaten back in the 70's when beef went sky high in price. It was in the grocery stores back then.
I can attest that at a Pro Ranch market in Phx there were things that certainly looked like horses' heads to me..that was probably four years ago. The meat cases there went on forever.
Liberty can be a scary thing at times. Folks should be real freedom lovers and not dilettantes in fancy dress. That is, not get all wound up about erring on the side of liberty over squeamishness.
The private sphere — social rebuke — can easily keep horsemeat a rare item. Why do the squeamish and the dilettantes insist that the government ban it?
What flecks my string of dander in this dust up is how some otherwise stalwart and scholarly conservative pundits blithely rewrite out parts of American history they don’t like, to falsely claim that their own particular personal policy preferences have force of American tradition.
Horsemeat is not a common meat, but neither is it rare in American butcher shop and food history.